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Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @09:50AM
from the proprietary-software-dies dept.

New submitter nthitz writes "Opera has announced that they will be dropping their rendering engine Presto, in favor of Webkit. This knocks the number of major rendering engines down to three. Opera will also be adopting the Chromium V8 Javascript engine. The news coincides with their announcement of 300 million users. '300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes on,' says Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software. 'On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market.'"
They've already submitted patches to improve multi-column layouts even.

Since Opera's engines were closed source anyway, I don't see the diversity they provided as terribly valuable. If they open source the stuff they're abandoning now (as they definitively should), that will be far more valuable.

As is often the case when closed code is made free, it may become clear why they decided to switch rather than clean up their own. Proprietary codebases are often a mess compared to a high quality open codebase. Seems to be most common with games, given the extreme deadline pressures they are subject to, but not unheard of in other areas. The value of opening the code is countered by the effort required to clean it up. And if there are gaps left by proprietary bits that can't be opened due to licensing

I'm not sure opening the code would bring that much value, but I do agree with you, since it couldn't hurt.

If some unemployed OCD programmers with a penchant for refactoring code can be turned loose on it, then even a snarly codebase that Opera abandoned might pay us some dividends.

I'm using Opera Mobile on my Android devices because they are so very pathetic; I have a Nook Simple Touch which runs 2,1 (won't someone please get gingerbread working?) and I have (get ready for it) an AT&T Fuze aka HTC Raphael 110, which can be booted into Gingerbread with very little reliability. But Opera Mobile actually runs

A browser monoculture based on webkit is at least better than a monoculture based on a closed source rendering engine...Just how bad it is, really comes down to who controls it and how much input other people have into it.

Of course without intervention pretty much everything will end up heading towards a monoculture... Linux for instance has pretty much killed the varied proprietary unixes that existed just as x86 has killed the risc processors they ran on.

So if a monoculture is inevitable, then minimising the damage by keeping it open is the best you can hope for.

Yeah, but there are always downsides to a monoculture. x86 is a big example. It took years longer than it should have to get 64 bit desktop computers because Intel was dragging it's heels. It's only once AMD came up with their own implementation and they had no other choice that they had to go along. Also look at power usage. We are finally getting real serious about mobile computing but Intel is too power hungry so you either get a device with less than stellar battery life, or a device that won't run all

A browser monoculture based on webkit is at least better than a monoculture based on a closed source rendering engine...Just how bad it is, really comes down to who controls it and how much input other people have into it.

Of course without intervention pretty much everything will end up heading towards a monoculture... Linux for instance has pretty much killed the varied proprietary unixes that existed just as x86 has killed the risc processors they ran on.

So if a monoculture is inevitable, then minimising the damage by keeping it open is the best you can hope for.

Last I checked, the various flavors of BSD were alive and well (but I haven't confirmed this with Netcraft, so I may be wrong).

That wasn't a good answer. He basically just said that they've tied the browser UI to the render engine and don't want to separate the two. There's no reason they couldn't keep Gecko to handle XUL and keep their JS extensions to support the browser UI. They just don't want to. Add in the comment about WebKit not supporting new JS standards, which has nothing to do with WebKit (WebKit isn't a JS engine) and you're left wondering what the guy is trying to defend.

It's no big deal. If some monopolist messed around with a single platform it would be easy to replace html with an ad hoc markup language, make a browser for that and ignore all previous standards. I'm not joking. There is really nothing magic about document markup and "mobile" application frameworks, almost any undergraduate CS student could come up with something better than what we have now, and an alternative WWW would be adopted very swifty if the old one for some reason became inconvenient to most use

This is bad news. Another step on the way to browser monoculture, with all the problems that can bring.

From TFA:

"It was always a goal to be compatible with the real web while also supporting and promoting open standards. That turns out to be a bit of a challenge when you are faced with a web that is not as open as one might have wanted."

The web isn't open. It never was. Many, many sites only start working properly in Opera when you mask as IE/Firefox, because browser sniffing is still a thing even in 2013.

The popularity of Webkit also brought its share of problems. Too many blogs and sites raving about exper

What? There is no TCP/IP monoculture. There are many different TCP/IP implementations. All of them interoperate without problems because there is a well-defined standard. That is not monoculture, that is standardization. They are fundamentally different things.

The Presto rendering engine had some pretty decent performance, and was often the fastest among the graphical browsers. If it's being abandoned, wouldn't it be nice if it were made available as open source? Webkit isn't the right tool for every occasion. I hate to see something so good just die.

I can confirm that Opera was the fastest browser before Chrome was on the scene. I visited my aunt once and was trying to use her ancient PC with my thumb drive... Firefox took forever to start, but Opera was instant and browsing was nice and snappy.

Still nothing compared to how Chrome would perform later, at least on other PCs, but still.

Those links are all over 2 years old, so don't really prove anything about the performance of Opera now. Especially considering how much webkit has developed in that time, and the shift in focus towards JS performance. The second link even says to stop posting it on Slashdot because it's so outdated.

Just speculation, but I wonder if this is cost related. It can't be cheap to keep Presto up to par with Webkit and Gecko. Using Webkit instead means they can spend less money on that, and devote more to the UI without particularly affecting the browser's standards compliance.

It is efficiency. We are no longer in a time where people are competing primarily by defining HTML standards. The standards are set and the competition is who can make the best browser experience. This could be integration into other servies, speed, or UI.

So, as a small company,m,m,. if Opera is to compete it has to make the front end look good, not spend time on the engine. Only MS has the money to spend competing on the engine.

As a web developer, I should be happy about this development, but the fact is: Opera was always standards compliant and as a user I liked how it rendered pages (qucikly and without any white screen gaps between page loads).

But it probably makes sense for them. Webkit is solid and their costs will probably go down dramatically.

The W3C requires at least two implementations of a standard before it can become a Recommendation. Thus, Google needs at least one ally with its own independent browser implementation to push standards through to Recommendation status. Of the five major browser vendors (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla and Opera), three of them (Google, Apple and Opera) are now all using a single rendering engine: Webkit. Apple may have a separate JavaScript engine, but it's a fierce competitor of Google, as is Microsoft. This leaves only Opera and Mozilla as potential standards partners, and Opera just went Webkit/V8. So, basically, Mozilla becomes Google's de facto ally for Web standards. (As if they weren't already, considering WebRTC.)

The W3C requires at least two implementations of a standard before it can become a Recommendation.

No one cares about the W3C any more. They've made themselves an irrelevant laughingstock by being years behind the times on updating the HTML and CSS standards. The result is that WebKit is the de facto standard now.

They initially made money selling the browser, later they had an add-supported version besides the paid version. Currently they make money on the desktop from search placements (e.g. using Google as default search engine) and a some stuff like certain bookmarks in the default setup. Besides the desktop they make money from OEMs licensing Opera for with mobile operators and for devices like mobiles and smart tv's.

Consider the goal: invariably produce specific output for specific input. Given certain markup, styles, and scripts, there's an expected result, and that result should be the same across all browsers. That's is why we have standards. Those standards help make the Web a great platform.

What, then, is the purpose of WebKit, Gecko, Presto, and Trident—four modern browser engines—all consuming development resources, each in pursuit of the exact same standards? If each were successful, we'd have four completely duplicative pieces of software when we only need exactly one.

Some people here are claiming about monoculture. Well, sorry, these aren't biological organisms. Imagine if, instead of having resources divided four ways, those resources were focused on a single project (or, at least, some of those resources were contributing to projects that aren't waste heat). These products are nearly as complex as operating systems. Think about what could be accomplished with all that poorly allocated effort?

Now Opera have come in and helped illustrate my point. They finally realized it's inefficient for them to reinvent the wheel a fourth time. (Maybe Microsoft will do the same.) They may have also realized all this redundant effort also create unnecessary work for web developers, who must perform grueling work and testing to understand and react to the subtle differences in all these engines. With this decision, they can get their engineering talent to focus on useful development, and they've saved the rest of us quite a bit of time, too.

We don't need multiple rendering engines, we just need one standards compliant one

Ideally, yes that's true. In practice, this would result in the one becoming a defacto standard, and whomever controls the one controls the standard. We are already kind of seeing this with WebKit. Competition is never a bad thing.

Except in webkit's case, nobody actually controls it. Sure, Google, Apple and Co do spend a lot of money paying developers to work on it, but the thing is open-source. Can they all just fork it at some point and turn the forks proprietary. Probably, but why would they? They already share the load on developing the thing, why wouldn't they continue sharing? It would also create fragmentation in their userbase, they really don't want that.

Who owns the master branch? Who guards the commit gates from the hordes? There's your defacto controllers of WebKit - you can fork all you want, but you need to get the main users (the browser integrators, Google et al) to follow your branch rather than the master.

Ideally, yes that's true. In practice, this would result in the one becoming a defacto standard, and whomever controls the one controls the standard. We are already kind of seeing this with WebKit.

It's true that WebKit is becoming a de facto standard, but I don't really see this as a problem. Some people say it's just like what happened with IE6, but there are several reasons why that was much more problematic:

The point is, when implementations are free, why do we need paper standards at all?

A standards organization is made up of industry members who are stakeholders and other interested parties. It's a democracy, which is why standards are always so slow in coming. An implementation is necessarily owned and managed by a much smaller group; democracy-styled software development management doesn't work.

The system we have now where we have standards organizations which are sufficiently careful and methodical and multiple implementations with one or more also acting as testbeds is serving us

You live on this cloud nine where standards are complete and leave nothing up for interpretation, and where implementations of the standards are bug-free and introduce no vendor-specific extensions. Alas, in the real world, it's not that way.

We already have the 'standard was the implementation' bullshit in Office Open XML. We don't need another in HTML/CSS.

Well, first of all, the 'implementation' of OOXML was not and is not open source, so it cannot be examined or freely used. For another thing, OOXML is more complicated by an order of magnitude than HTML/CSS.

Imagine if we had said that a few years ago, when IE6 ruled the market. Without the competition from Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror, among others, do you think Microsoft would have ever improved their browser?

Competition is good. I happen to like Webkit, but I'm not looking forward to a world in which EVERYONE uses webkit. Someone needs to be odd man out, doing things differently, and looking for "the next big thing" in web browsers.

Don't forget that Opera is more that just a desktop browser. It really shines on mobile platforms with Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. The Wii's web browser is also Opera.

From what I hear, they're really big in second and third world countries where bandwidth is more limited and/or you pay by the kilobyte. Opera excels at compressing the content (especially with Opera Turbo).

Sorry, there no such thing as "excelling" at compression "especially" with Opera Turbo. The browser has zero control over compression, it can request plain old gzip compression from the server, and the server may or may not oblige. That's all that's available without a dedicated server. Opera Turbo is a system where the browser basically hijacks you connection and routes it over an Opera-controlled server. It's that server that then obtains the website content for you and compresses it. It's the only way te

Sorry, there no such thing as "excelling" at compression "especially" with Opera Turbo. The browser has zero control over compression, it can request plain old gzip compression from the server, and the server may or may not oblige. That's all that's available without a dedicated server. Opera Turbo is a system where the browser basically hijacks you connection and routes it over an Opera-controlled server.

So the first part of your comment was irrelevant, except to note in passing that Opera has always had good HTTP compression support, and other features to speed up page loading (e.g. not loading images, or loading them selectively).

It's hardly hijacking if they they tell you what they're doing, and you have to click a button to enable it:When Opera Turbo is enabled, webpages are compressed via Opera's servers so that they use much less data than the originals. This means that there is less to download, so you can see your webpages more quickly.

Enabling Opera Turbo is as simple as clicking the Opera Turbo icon at the bottom-left of the Opera browser window. When you are on a fast connection again and Opera Turbo is not needed, the Opera browser will automatically disable it.http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/ [opera.com]

For me, it's the best of Chrome (look, speed, good tabs, etc.) and Firefox (has about:config, intuitive, etc.). One thing that hasn't been copied from Opera yet that doesn't make any sense... Anytime you get a JavaScript alert box, Opera adds a little checkbox allowing you to stop executing scripts on the page. Ever accidentally land on a website that kept spewing off alerts without you being able to close the page except by killing it? Opera also did extensions right; they're super easy to make. Opera has always either been the first or the first to do it right. Hands down.

Chrome will prompt you to kill popups / download requests if it gets too many, and after a script has hung for some time will give you a prompt to kill it. I believe Firefox has that second feature as well.

pera Turbo is a system where the browser basically hijacks you connection and routes it over an Opera-controlled server. It's that server that then obtains the website content for you and compresses it. It's the only way technically to accomplish that, at the price of essentially giving yourself a man-in-the-middle attack. It's not very funny

And when you live in a small village in africa and an hour of smartphone use could cost a day's pay, you get mighty thankful for that compression. These aren't the sorts of people that do online banking and are worried about MitM. Many of them are very happy to exchange email with friends and relatives in another village, and text compresses very nicely.

Just because it's not the right feature for you doesn't mean there isn't a significant sized group that really appreciates it.

Small village in Africa? How about many areas of the USA that can't get anything but dialup or a capped all to fuck connection? At my mom's place the ONLY thing they can get is wiFi run by a Billy Joe Bob that knows jack shit about dividing bandwidth so when some dumbshit is watching netflix on the thing you pretty much have to have something like turbo.

Most folks don't realize how truly shitty our coverage really is because they go by zip code and the way they measure is if ANYBODY in that zip code can g

The only thing their browser is really excellent at is IIRC browsing porn or generally image galleries with lots of image content.

BS. I have a limited data plan, and I use Opera to reduce the amount of $$$ I pay. And it works extremely well. So what if my data routes through a server? It goes through various central points anyway. I know Opera can see my surfing habits, and adapt my surfing behaviour accordingly.

Privacy is important, but it is ridiculous to assert that it is the only thing to take into consideration.

Yeah, opera has a lot of builtin features that are great for porn browsing. (like finding the next/previous image based on a number in the url). I ran into an Opera engineer at a live sex show in Amsterdam a few years ago and he confirmed that porn was their original demographic -- use IE for regular browsing, opera for the stuff you don't want your wife/husband/kids to know about. (And porn ads were the most lucrative.) They used to have work orgies and such but that's tamed down now.

Opera Turbo is useful if you find yourself bandwidth constrained. e.g. I have a 3G key for when I'm in Spain which used to have a 100MB limit per day before kicking down to 64kbps. Enabling Turbo, ad block, a disk cache and / or squid (I used both) were all ways to maximize the internet I got for my allowance. The datacap appears to have risen up to 300MB a day last time I used it so the need is not so pressing but I still enable turbo to just to claw back space.

Sorry, there no such thing as "excelling" at compression "especially" with Opera Turbo.

You're obviously unfamiliar with how Opera does their compression. And its the same reason that I actually do not use the mobile version of Opera (well I don't use Opera at all, but I did try their mobile browser). They redirect all requests through their server where they reprocess images and do other things to compress and reduce the data footprint for a website. This is how they are able to excel at compression. The cost is your privacy and security.

Sadly they've let it go to shit the past several releases, probably because they knew they were walking away from it. my oldest was a die HARD Opera user, he wouldn't touch a system without Opera and used to carry Opera portable on a stick so he wouldn't have to use anything else but even he is trying various browsers because he says Opera gets slower and buggier with each release.

If they are gonna abandon presto I really wish they'd open up the code, who knows what good could be made of an open presto engine. After all Mozilla rose from the ashes of netscape, maybe with it open devs could make presto so good opera would end up switching back.

Of course all this is ignoring the rotting elephant in the room which the EU and DoJ really REALLY needs to investigate, and that is Apple's ability to influence the market with their monopolistic practices. Before some Applelite chimes in with "Apple isn't a monopoly" bullshit, total bullshit, look up the wording. it says you do NOT need 100% of the market, you don't even have to own the majority of the market, just that you have the power to assert undue influence and you would be hard pressed to find anybody that says Apple doesn't seriously influence the markets. From the prices of books to whether the web will run on an open format like Theora VS a locked down H.264 ALL of the major calls about the web made in the last couple of years has been made with iPhone in mind.

Do you think Opera would be ditching presto if it could run on the iPhone? Do you think we'd be forced to run HTML V5 before its ready or use a patent troll format like H.264 if iPhone users could choose between that and Flash and WebM and Drac and Theora? No if the company of St Steve of Cupertino says "it is thus" then that is what it is gonna be, no choices in the matter. And I think they need to be investigated as NO company should have that power, I was against MSFT using IE to gain control and I'm against Apple using iPhone/iPad to gain more control. No matter what device or OS you use the web should be about choice, not some corp laying down the law.

Opera Mini and Nokia Asha's browser are huge in countries with spotty/bad/expensive mobile coverage. They shrink pages to about 10% of their original size and then stream them from a local proxy. Speed increases are phenomenal.

On the downside it does mangle some pages pretty badly and you don't want to do any really sensitive stuff through it as it's a proxy browser (i.e. banking). Of course, in most of the developing countries at which these systems are aimed Opera and Nokia are trusted FAR more then local

Back when our campus got hit with MS Blaster and everyone had ~1kbps in their dorms, my roommate showed me Opera and how it loaded webpages roughly 2-3x faster than others. I dont recall whether turbo was out at this point, but IIRC Opera was doing something that grabbed page data much quicker than whatever else I was using at the time.

Opera integrates the different components much more tightly than, say, Thunderbird and Firefox. Email and IRC effectively become just another tab and it allows them to share resources so that they're more efficient than having separate programs for each one. It'd be great if Opera released a light version with just the browser, but I don't think you'd really see huge improvements by removing those features simply because they are so well integrated.

Personally, I don't want an all-in-one. But, some people don't want to switch between applications. They just want to move from one tab to another. That's cool, I guess. I'm far more comfortable with separate applications, almost always spread between several virtual desktops. The wife, on the other hand, has never used virtual desktops, and seldom switches between applications. She's a better multi-tasker than I am, in real life, but on the computer, hang it up. One window, one des

Me neither, normally
However, to me sites like StackOverflow and newsgroups or mailinglists pretty much represent the same activity (over different protocols). I really like having those together in the same application, and Opera merges those rather nicely.

On top of that they where the first to implement tabs, which for me was the initial reason to start using Opera. And afaik they are still the only browser to have mouse gestures out of the box, something which I wouldn't want to do without anymore.

Opera's javascript engine was pretty fast a few years ago, before chrome existed. It was way faster than firefox's, ie's or safari's.

Then chrome arrived and, although opera's engine has evolved a lot and is faster than ever, it never managed to reclaim its first place, even letting firefox claim the second place in the javascript speed race.

I use Opera because it both has the best usage paradigm for me and integrates with pretty much everything I need to do online.

It takes far less time for me to do anything in Opera than it would in another browser. There are extensions for some Opera features in other browsers, like Mouse Gestures, user scripts, and user CSS. But they all lack capabilities that Opera's native version has. There are also no extensions for some Opera features like Tab stacking [minus.com], or mass-refreshing, pinning, or deleting tabs and windows. [minus.com] (Complete with incremental tab search.) The website-independent settings settings are also awesome, I've used them to make my Slashdot hot pink [minus.com] for example.:)

It has shortcuts for everything too, and if it doesn't, you can make them. [minus.com] One in particular I use is Mousewheel tab switching. [minus.com] Firefox has partial mousewheel tab-switching in it's current incarnations, but it only works with [Right Click] + [Mousewheel down].

Why would someone use anything other than Chrome or Chromium on any platform?

On Mac, one good reason would be because it is just 32 bit - unlike the rest of the system. This means that e.g. java does not work in Chrome on Mac. While that might be seen as a good thing at some times;), this means that you can't use many of the banks here in Norway - or do online credit card payments.

ow that they've switched to webkit, can anybody tell me what makes them different from Chrome now?

Everything other than the rendering engine?

Well, not everything, since they are switching to V8 Javascript engine, as well.

OTOH, differentiation on lots of axes may not be as important to them as being able to drive the web in the direction they want. Opera-pushed changes to web standards may be easier get accepted by other browser vendors (and, consequently, standards bodies on which those vendors sit) if,

How exactly does this work? If we had a monoculture (like we had with IE6), people code to the monoculture, standards be damned. If WebKit implements a standard badly, no amount of complaining by Microsoft and Mozilla will cause the WebKit folks to change their browser rendering to be compliant. And just like what happened with IE6, web developers will ignore the standard in favor of the WebKit implementation. We're ALREADY seeing this happen - webkit has sufficient market share that sites don't bother building standards compliant version of their mobile site, they just write for webkit and consider their work done.

History has shown that if you have a monoculture, standards are irrelevant - the only thing that matters is the one implementation.

If WebKit implements a standard badly, no amount of complaining by Microsoft and Mozilla will cause the WebKit folks to change their browser rendering to be compliant.

Assuming there's malice involved and the WebKit developers have an interest in breaking the web, which nobody seems to argue. They just add experimental features that aren't standardized yet, lazy developers use the experimental tags and don't bother to make it work on anything else. I don't see how they can do it any other way, unless they hold off on all development until the W3C gets around to making a final standard, which doesn't exactly happen quick. If there was a real unwillingness to make WebKit st

A common open-source base implementation for core features of a class of applications for which interoperability is an important feature isn't the same thing as a monopoly. It doesn't have any of the problems that come from a monopoly (it may have some of the problems associated with monoculture, which is a different issue than a monopoly.)

Diversity is power. Since everyone walks into a different direction, and then on top of that can take the best of everybody else.

One of the reasons I didn't use Opera was actually because Web developers never tended to create content with Opera's rendering engine in mind.

And that's actually the problem with Opera moving to webkit. Developers shouldn't have any specific rendering engine in mind. They should have the W3C standard in mind. By having one less rendering engine (even if it's just a minority one) reduces the pressure on web developers to code according to standards.
It also makes it much harder to spot bugs in rendering